Policy Convergence Research Articles

Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Partnership with the United States: Fraying at the Margins?

The strategic partnership between Saudi Arabia and the US withstood the test of time despite occasional challenges. Even as the US dependence on Gulf oil weaned, the partnership continued due to foreign policy convergences and the security nexus. The Arab Spring uprisings challenged the partnership leading to foreign policy divergences. While the US looked for reducing its regional commitments, the Kingdom diversified relations with emerging powers. Notwithstanding the divergent foreign policy choices, which are likely to continue given global and regional geopolitics, the strategic partnership flourished, and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Implementation of the Bologna Process Credit Value System: A Comparative Analysis of the Cameroonian and UK Universities

The ‘external dimension’ of the Bologna Process (BP) has enhanced the scientific interest in the influence of the ‘Bologna Message’ outside Europe, with the 2006 Zgaga report focusing on the prospects of global adaptation among non-European ‘partners’. Many African countries have aligned themselves with the BP by adapting their curricular structure and qualifications in line with the European Bologna architecture geared at maintaining relationships with their ex-colonial European imperialists; for instance, Cameroon, and its ex-imperialists Britain and France. Arguably, although the BP has sparked convergence at the higher global level, many divergences occur at the lower national/institutional levels. This article compares and contrasts the implementation of the BP reform in Cameroonian and UK universities with a focus on the credit value system. It employs Bennett’s model of policy convergence as theoretical framework. Using a qualitative approach, it thematically analyses secondary data (text documents). Findings indicate that although the Cameroonian and UK HE systems converge by adopting the BP credit system, both HE systems diverge upon implementation resulting from different outcomes, problems and/or criticisms encountered. Knowledge of the findings are relevant in providing insights on the BP realities which can be informative in drawing up stocktaking reports (regarding the achievements and failures of the reform), redirect focus, assessments and facilitate future monitoring and progress of the reform within the Bologna community.

Strategia Forestale Nazionale italiana e governo integrato degli incendi boschivi

Since February 2022, the National Forestry Strategy (NFS) for the forest sector and its supply chains is public. The NFS addresses in an innovative and science-based way key issues related to forest fire governance such as the integrated fire risk management, the convergence of forest, agro-pastoral and nature conservation policies with fire governance strategies, the regulatory update and the roadmap to open-access wildfire data.

Patent protection and foreign R&D investment location choices: inventor mobility and policy convergence

Abstract We suggest two boundary conditions for the positive role of patent protection in attracting inward foreign R&D investments. Patent protection is less effective in limiting the leakage of nonpatented knowledge through interfirm mobility of employees, and a gradual strengthening of patent protection worldwide diminishes its effect as countries get closer to the intellectual property rights (IPR) frontier. We provide evidence in an empirical analysis of 3393 multinational firms’ R&D location choices for 8015 greenfield R&D investments in 105 (potential) host countries, during 2003–2014. The relationship between R&D investment location choices and IPR protection is subject to declining marginal effects and negatively moderated by inventor mobility.

Convergence on Coercion: Functional and Political Pressures as Drivers of Global Childhood Vaccine Mandates.

Vaccine hesitancy is a global problem with diverse local policy responses, from voluntaristic to coercive. Between 2015 and 2017, California, Australia, France, and Italy increased the coerciveness of their childhood vaccine regimes. Despite this apparent convergence, there is little evidence of imposition, policy learning, or diffusion - the drivers that are usually discussed in scholarly literature on policy convergence. The fact that the four governments were oriented across the political spectrum, with quite different political and institutional systems, further indicates an empirical puzzle. To better understand the drivers of enhanced vaccine mandates, a crucial issue during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global rollout, this article engages with four case studies assembled from qualitative analysis of semi-structured in-country interviews and document analysis between November 2018 and November 2020. Key informants had specific expert knowledge or played a role in the introduction or implementation of the new policies. Interview transcripts were coded inductively and deductively, augmented with extensive analysis of legal, policy, academic and media documents. The case analysis identifies two key and interacting elements in government decisions to tighten vaccine mandates: functional and political pressures. Policy-makers in Italy and France were primarily driven by functional challenges, with their vaccination governance systems under threat from reduced population compliance. California and Australia did not face systemic threats to the functioning of their systems, but activists utilised local opportunities to heighten political pressure on decision makers. In four recent cases of high-income jurisdictions making childhood vaccination policies more coercive, vaccine hesitancy alone could not explain why the policies arose in these jurisdictions and not others, while path dependency alone could not explain why some jurisdictions with mandates made them more coercive. Explanation lies in restrictive mandates being attractive for governments, whether they face systemic functional problems in vaccine governance, or political pressures generated by media and activists. Mandates can be framed as targeting whole populations or localised groups of refusers, and implemented without onerous costs or policy complexity.

Learning Contraction Policies From Offline Data

This letter proposes a data-driven method for learning convergent control policies from offline data using Contraction theory. Contraction theory enables constructing a policy that makes the closed-loop system trajectories inherently convergent towards a unique trajectory. At the technical level, identifying the contraction metric, which is the distance metric with respect to which a robot’s trajectories exhibit contraction is often non-trivial. We propose to jointly learn the control policy and its corresponding contraction metric while enforcing contraction. To achieve this, we learn an implicit dynamics model of the robotic system from an offline data set consisting of the robot’s state and input trajectories. We propose a data augmentation algorithm for learning contraction policies using this learned dynamics model. We randomly generate samples in the state space and propagate them forward in time through the learned dynamics model to generate auxiliary sample trajectories. We then learn both the control policy and the contraction metric such that the distance between the trajectories from the offline data set and our generated auxiliary sample trajectories decreases over time. We evaluate the performance of our proposed framework on simulated robotic goal-reaching tasks and demonstrate that enforcing contraction results in faster convergence and greater robustness of the learned policy.

How do policy transfer mechanisms influence policy outcomes in the context of authoritarianism in Vietnam?

The literature on policy transfer shows that it may result in simultaneous policy convergence and policy divergence. However, little is known about how such results happen when transferring from multiple and possibly contrasting sources. This study finds that civil service reforms in Vietnam’s merit-based policies are influenced by both western and Asian models of meritocracy. This makes them both closer to universal ‘best practices’ and at the same time sharpens the distinctiveness of Vietnam’s policy. The calculations of political actors in combination with the context of a one-party authoritarian state have led to policy transfer through mechanisms of translation and assemblage which brings about a hybrid of convergence and divergence. This study enhances understanding of policy transfer in the context of Asian authoritarianism. In finding hybridity in transfer outcomes in this national context, the article shows the uniqueness of resultant policy change and develops an analytical framework for the influence of policy transfer on policy outcomes.

Hybrid process model and smart policy network of electric-vehicle resources for instantaneous power flow imbalances

The technology development of power electronics and battery empowers electric vehicles as practical approaches for the compensation of instantaneous power flow imbalance. To utilize the response capability of distributed vehicles and stabilize the grid frequency caused by instant power mismatch, a process model hybridizing the data-driven and conventional modes is designed for the electrical-grid-electric-vehicle system. Due to the real-time variations of power system, electric vehicles, and renewable energies, the hybrid process model directly interacts with the system feedback to remove the sophisticated model establishment, which effectively establishes the mapping relationship between system states and intelligently processing demands. Based on the hybrid process model, the smart policy network with an adversarial mechanism is then developed to enhance the model behavior. To fulfill the continuous action requirement and speed up the policy convergence, a proximal optimization strategy is further introduced to adjust hyperparameters through a stochastic ratio automatically. Bridging the huge volume of real-time dynamics and the action domain, the sufficient utilization of various operation states is achieved in the proposed process model and policy network, which notably detects the optimal operation point and reduces the power flow imbalance. The developed hybrid process model and smart policy network are validated through an electrical-grid-electric-vehicle system by comprehensive studies from four aspects of the process performance, generalization, robustness, and efficiency. Compared with the linear and naive hybrid process methods, 3.95 times superior integration performance and the improved evolution process of 64.5% improvement are both demonstrated as well as the robustness facing various circumstances.

Policy instrument choice under globalization: Do authoritarian states choose differently?

• New data show policy convergence among 15 ex-Soviet states in childcare deinstitutionalization. • Countries adopted policies as ‘a package’ (goals + instruments), as promoted by international actors. • Authoritarian states adopted the same policy instruments, as non-authoritarian states. • Authoritarian states adopted ‘modern’, non-coercive policy instruments, based on the agentic individual. • World culture and international advocacy appear key to childcare policy instrument choice. Do authoritarian states differ from non-authoritarian ones in their social policy choices? The paper presents new data on childcare deinstitutionalization policies in 15 ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The data suggest significant convergence among countries in the adoption of both deinstitutionalization policy ‘ends’ and ‘means’, despite drastic differences in political regimes. In particular, I trace the adoption of several instruments, which have been actively promoted by international organizations (e.g., foster care, case management, downsizing of institutions, etc.). The data suggest that authoritarian states in the ex-Soviet region do not differ from non-authoritarian governments in their deinstitutionalization instrument choices, suggesting that political regime is not always a major policy determinant. The results are significant because they show that authoritarian regimes can also select modern, non-coercive instruments for childcare deinstitutionalization, which are underpinned by the idea of agentic actors and the centrality of the individual.

Biofuel supply chain management in the circular economy transition: An inclusive knowledge map of the field

Investment in biofuels, as sustainable alternatives for fossil fuels, has gained momentum over the last decade due to the global environmental and health concerns regarding fossil fuel consumption. Hence, effective management of biofuel supply chain (BSC) components, including biomass feedstock production, biomass logistics, biofuel production in biorefineries, and biofuel distribution to consumers, is crucial in transitioning towards a low-carbon and circular economy (CE). The present study aims to render an inclusive knowledge map of the BSC-related scientific production. In this vein, a systematic review, supported by a keywords co-occurrence analysis and qualitative content analysis, was carried out on a total of 1,975 peer-reviewed journal articles in the target literature. The analysis revealed four major research hotspots in the BSC literature, namely (1) biomass-to-biofuel supply chain design and planning, (2) environmental impacts of biofuel production, (3) biomass to bioenergy, and (4) techno-economic analysis of biofuel production. Besides, the findings showed that the following subject areas of research in the BSC research community have recently attracted more attention: (i) global warming and climate change mitigation, (ii) development of the third-generation biofuels produced from algal biomass, which has recently gained momentum in the CE debate, and (iii) government incentives, pricing, and subsidizing policies. The provided insights shed light on the understanding of researchers, stakeholders, and policy-makers involved in the sustainable energy sector by outlining the main research backgrounds, developments, and tendencies within the BSC arena. Looking at the provided knowledge map, potential research directions in BSCs towards implementing the CE model, including (i) integrative policy convergence at macro, meso, and micro levels, and (ii) industrializing algae-based biofuel production towards the CE transition, were proposed.

Design, adoption and implementation of electronic waste policies in India.

Globally, E-waste is experiencing an unprecedented growth in the recent years. This growth will be fueled further by the COVID-19 pandemic owing to the new work culture where people are becoming more dependent on their electronic products than ever before. However, governance of E-waste, particularly in the Global South, has been a complex phenomenon. Considering this, the current study attempted to assess the design, adoption, and implementation of E-waste policies in India-a major electronics manufacturing hub with a massive consumer electronics market. Taking hints from theoretical concepts such as policy transfer, policy convergence, and policy effectiveness, the study addressed the primary research question: why India adopts E-waste policy approaches that seem inadequate and ineffective in its local contexts and attempts to identify alternative approaches. Through expert interviews and policy document analysis, it was observed that E-waste policy approaches in India are largely influenced by the European Union's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. All the experts interviewed recognized absence of the informal sector in India's policy efforts of both 2011 and 2016 as a significant lacuna in the country's E-waste policy responses. In this paper, the author argues that there should be policy change towards a healthy collaboration between the informal and formal sector where best-of-the-two-worlds could be wisely used for sustainable E-waste governance in India.

What and whom are family policies for? Unpacking the meaning of citizens’ support for family policy across Europe

AbstractThe paper provides a comparative investigation into public attitudes to family policies. It shows that citizens’ support for family policies is diverse across different welfare regimes with respect to four countries belonging to distinct regimes: the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway and Slovenia. Using qualitative data, we unpack the ways individuals view the need for family policies, the rationale they use to explain their support for family policies and for imposing restrictions on access to family policies – ie. why, for whom and under which conditions. We find that social rights narratives are common in Norway; a social investment logic is prevalent in Germany and Slovenia; while in the United Kingdom, the dominant view is closer to the work-central individualised responsibility narrative of neoliberalism. In addition, we find differences across regimes in which family policies should target. In the United Kingdom and Germany, the focus is much more on providing support to activate parents, while in Norway and partly Slovenia, the focus is on providing well-being for children. The findings show that despite some convergence in family policies across Europe in recent times, we still find clear diversity in what and for whom family policies are for, its rationale largely embedded in the larger institutional normative structures of the welfare state. The results not only contribute to the literature on the relationship between public attitudes and welfare institutions, but also point towards shifting ideas about the role of family policies in the context of societal change.

The quest for convergence in Hungarian-Romanian relationships: A multi-actor approach and the transferability of good practices

Hungarian-Romanian relations are difficult to assess because they involve a vast set of actors: from diplomats to civil society, from political parties to churches. If convergence in foreign policy is to be achieved and if genuine reconciliation is to take place, all these actors have to be taken into consideration and have to engage in a concerted manner. Bilateral relations between Hungary and Romania benefit from a dense network of cooperation initiatives, but they are neither sustainable, nor integrated into a vision aiming for convergence and reconciliation. Political will, joint historical research projects and youth bi-ethnic socialization are critical in creating a bilateral relation supported by true reconciliation.

Inter-regionalismo UE-ALC durante a pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has shown a variety of responses from countries of the two regions, ranging from denialism to regional health cooperation. This article aims to assess how these reactions have impacted European Union (EU) and Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) inter-regional relations, considering multiple and sometimes incompatible approaches taken by national and regional actors. The article contends that the existence of contrasting approaches – coupled with previous institutional and political challenges faced by the EU and LAC regional organisations – have undermined the convergence of national health policies into regional ones, and the promotion of multilateral responses and institutions in a post-pandemic world. First, focus is given to the main characteristics and institutional features of contemporary EU-LAC relations, usually conceived as a multidimensional and multi-tier relationship. Second, it introduces how EU and LAC countries and regional organisations have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating distinct ways that EU-LAC actors have engaged with the outbreak and the main challenges and successes for regional cooperation in this respect. Lastly, the main developments and challenges for EU-LAC overall relations in pandemic times are indicated, highlighting how EU-LAC actors have attempted to cooperate in order to develop a more positive and sustainable inter-regional partnership for the future.

NATO-EU: security policy in the XXI century.

The article characterizes the state and development of the security policy of NATO and the EU in the 21st century. The main provisions of the EU security system are disclosed. Attention is focused on the key aspects of the formation of a strategic partnership in the specified period. Challenges to European and global security that consolidate NATO and EU efforts to deepen cooperation are outlined. There are terrorism, Russian aggression, hybrid, and now full-scale war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, the strengthening of the role of China, Brexit, climate change, 5G, cybercrime, the global remilitarization race, increasing defense budgets, the coronavirus pandemic, and others. It is noted that both the EU and NATO are looking for adequate tools for responding to these challenges and tools for adapting to the new state of affairs. It was emphasized that Russian aggression and an attack on a sovereign democratic state have become the biggest threat to European security. The modern architecture of European and world security largely depends on whether a collective action will be able to provide support for Ukraine, protect values and stabilize the existing world order. Documents, official publications, statements of leaders, etc. were analyzed. The main principles and directions of NATO-EU cooperation in the field of security, as well as the priorities of political-strategic and diplomatic cooperation, which ensures the coordination of plans, have been accumulated. The strategic partnership is based on strengthening cooperation on crisis management, enabling NATO to support the EU in crisis management and operations through the sharing of resources, operational planning and management. It was concluded that the closer convergence of EU and NATO security policies in 2016 was activated by the EU policy, which was aimed at strengthening Europe’s collective security through cooperation with its strategic partners, starting with NATO. It was noted that one of the key principles of cooperation between the EU and NATO is a single set of forces. This means that joint member states do not have separate armed forces for NATO and separate ones for the EU. That is why the EU and NATO are working to streamline the priorities and bring together the processes of defense planning, cooperation in civil and military operations, military exercises and the development of the defense industry. The senior leadership of the EU and NATO also coordinates political activities and diplomatic matters to ensure a coherent and common approach in the Euro-Atlantic community. A separate important item in the list of joint measures between the EU and NATO is the improvement of military mobility, which should significantly contribute to the increase of joint defense capabilities. It is revealed how the intention to strengthen the partnership is reflected in the NATO 2030 development strategy and in the new strategic concept of NATO – 2022. It is concluded that according to the Strategy, the EU acts as an important and unique partner of NATO and that these organizations play a complementary, harmonious and mutually reinforcing role in maintaining international peace and security. Neither NATO nor the European Union has all the tools needed to respond to Russia’s malign activities or to challenges involving other non-military threats. Faced with these threats, they need to work together and have many tools, political, diplomatic, economic, military, which facilitate countermeasures. And despite the existence of different views on the role of the EU and NATO in the implementation of security policy, their mandates in the sphere of security and defense coincide and complement each other more and more. However, it is obvious that there are more common themes for NATO and the EU in the defense sphere than dividing factors.

Safe and Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Clustered Dynamic Environments

This letter proposes a safe and sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) framework to address two major challenges in developing applicable RL algorithms: satisfying safety constraints and efficiently learning with limited samples. To guarantee safety in real-world complex environments, we use the safe set algorithm (SSA) to monitor and modify the nominal controls, and evaluate SSA+RL in a clustered dynamic environment which is challenging to be solved by existing RL algorithms. However, the SSA+RL framework is usually not sample-efficient especially in reward-sparse environments, which has not been addressed in previous safe RL works. To improve the learning efficiency, we propose three techniques: (1) avoiding behaving overly conservative by adapting the SSA; (2) encouraging safe exploration using random network distillation with safety constraints; (3) improving policy convergence by treating SSA as expert demonstrations and directly learn from that. The experimental results show that our framework can achieve better safety performance compare to other safe RL methods during training and solve the task with substantially fewer episodes.

The Convergence of Policies, Consumers and ESG: Five Examples Pulled from Recent Reports on the US Biobased Economy

The Convergence of Policies, Consumers and ESG: Five Examples Pulled from Recent Reports on the US Biobased Economy

Global diffusion of three road safety policies, 1964\u20132015

Global convergence of public policies has been regarded as a defining feature of the late twentieth century. This study explores the generalizability of this thesis for three road safety measures: (i) road safety agencies; (ii) child restraint laws; and (iii) mandatory use of daytime running lights. This study analyzes cross-national longitudinal data using survival analysis for the years 1964–2015 in 181 countries. The first main finding is that only child restraint laws have globally converged; in contrast, the other two policies exhibit a fractured global convergence process, likely as the result of competing international and national forces. This finding may reflect the lack of necessary conditions, at the regional and national levels, required to accelerate the spread of policies globally, adding further nuance to the global convergence thesis. A second finding is that mechanisms of policy adoption, such as imitation/learning and competition, rather than coercion, explain more consistently global and regional convergence outcomes in the road safety realm. This finding reinforces the idea of specific elective affinities, when explaining why the diffusion of policies may or not result in convergence. Lastly, by recognizing fractured convergence processes, these results call for revisiting the global convergence thesis and reintegrating more consistently regional analyses into policy diffusion and convergence studies.

Monetary Policy Convergence within the EAC: A Focus on Interest Rate and Exchange Rate

This study was conducted to establish whether the key variables in monetary policy transmission mechanisms are converging within the East African Community. This region is eyeing having an economic union and subsequently a monetary union hence the significance of investing developments in the monetary sector. The analysis used panel data from the year 2005 to 2020 for five EACs. To test for convergence of interest rates and exchange rates, the analysis employed; unit-root test, sigma convergence, co-integration tests, and finally used the panel fixed effect model to establish the impact of the two variables on the GDP. The analysis shows that in the short run, there is no convergence in interest rates but there is convergence in exchange rates. However, in the long run, the two monetary policy variables are co-integrated indicating that the region is doing well in terms of integration in the financial sector in their preparation to form a common trade area and monetary union. The analysis of the impact of the two variables on economic growth shows that only the exchange rate is significant, therefore, the region should strive to foster a stable exchange rate regime to realize increased economic growth.

Governing global policy: what IPE can learn from public policy?

ABSTRACT As the state has become more susceptible to global pathologies, public policy scholars have found increasingly common ground with their IPE cousins. The development of these relatively young fields of study – increasingly they are sub-disciplines – has been commensurate but rarely intersecting. Yet contemporary maelstroms of global politics, economics, health, and security, span borders with ease, and increasingly force us to recognise, reconsider, and reconceptualise the overlapping realms of the national and international. In so doing, we must overcome the disciplinary distinctions. In this article, we traverse the prominent in-built disciplinary imperatives and methodologies that have kept these two disciplines from concerted inter-operability or, at least, interchange of theories and concepts. To do so, we begin by presenting a brief overview of the conceptual pedigrees and trajectories of these disciplines, before drawing attention to the prominent prevailing overlaps, ‘trespasses’ and tensions as they specifically relate to policy convergence and diffusion, and policy transfer. We proceed to specify a reconciliation of these tensions through, in the third section, a brief study of the growth of global administrations, administrators, and administrative spaces. This, we contend, stands as a paradigm case of how reconciled IPE/public policy concepts can produce enhanced theoretical and substantive insights into the transnationalising political world.